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Reconciling Sales Tax on Expense Markups (VRTrust)

Reconciling Sales Tax on Expense Markups (VRTrust)

Audience: Property managers and accounting partners using VRTrust who apply sales tax codes to expense markups and need to reconcile and remit county-level sales tax at month end.

Overview

VRTrust supports applying tax codes to expense markups, which allows you to collect sales tax from owners on billed expenses (for example, county-level sales tax on maintenance or cleaning services). This is separate from lodging and occupancy tax on reservation nights.

Important: VRTrust currently does not have a dedicated built-in report for sales tax collected via expense markups. The Reservation Lodging & Occupancy Tax Report covers rental-night taxes only — it does not capture sales tax from expense markups.

Prerequisites

Before you can produce a useful month-end sales tax reconciliation, make sure your chart of accounts is set up correctly:

  • Each county-level sales tax code should post to a dedicated liability account in your chart of accounts (for example, "Sales Tax Payable – County A", "Sales Tax Payable – County B").

  • If multiple tax codes all post to the same generic liability account, you won't be able to separate them by jurisdiction from the GL export alone.

Month-End Workflow: Reconciling and Remitting Expense Markup Sales Tax

Since there is no dedicated report, you'll build the reconciliation from your General Ledger detail:

  1. Go to Reports → General Ledger (or use the Transactions export).

  2. Filter by your sales tax liability account(s) for the period you're closing. If you have one account per county, run each account separately to get a county-level subtotal.

  3. Export to CSV.

  4. Sum the tax collected by jurisdiction using Excel, Google Sheets, or an AI tool like Claude connected to VRPlatform's MCP.

  5. Use that total to file and remit with the relevant county authority.

  6. Record the tax payment back in VRTrust as an expense transaction, posted to the same sales tax liability account — this clears the balance for the period.

How This Differs from Lodging & Occupancy Tax

Lodging & Occupancy Tax

Sales Tax on Expense Markups

Tied to

Reservation nights

Billed expenses with markup tax codes

Built-in report

Yes — Reservation Lodging & Occupancy Tax Report

No — use GL export

Reconciliation path

Run the report, export CSV

Export GL by liability account, build in Excel/Claude

Tips

  • Set up one liability account per county from the start. Retroactively separating mixed postings is time-consuming.

  • Use Claude + VRPlatform MCP to automate the GL-to-filing summary if you manage multiple counties or teams. Claude can query your GL data directly and produce a jurisdiction-level tax summary in seconds.

  • Verify your tax codes are posting correctly by checking a test expense in the General Ledger before relying on this workflow for filing.

Related Articles

  • Setting Up Tax Codes in VRTrust

  • Adding and Editing Expenses (VRTrust)

  • Reservation Lodging & Occupancy Tax Report (VRTrust)

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